Ricky's response confirms that Dravid's mistake was in getting caught. Notice that Ponting didn't say "We never do such things". What he said was "You won't see us doing anything like that". i.e. his team would never be caught by umpires, match referees, opponents (live or on television) doing something like that.

Then, the ICC decided that the ICC Champions Trophy would be postponed to Oct 2009, with the proviso that the environment is deemed fit for an international tournament to be staged and there are no security concerns. In case people didn't notice, the boards that wanted the tournament to be moved or rescheduled weren't all 'white'. South Africa and West Indies had concerns as well. In my opinion, this is certainly not an instance of a racial split in cricket, as is often made out to be!

The move is highly likely to cause a lot of ripples in international series scheduling. The ICC's Future Tours Programme doesn't seem to have too much flexibility to accommodate the tournament in 2009. Looking at the schedule, mid-Apr 2009 to early-May 2009 seems the only time period when there's very little international cricket scheduled. West Indies host Bangladesh in that duration, but come on, who cares about that series!

Amidst all the chaos, India have gone 2-1 up against Sri Lanka in the one-day series with a fairly comprehensive 33 run win in the 3rd ODI. But I still don't understand why Sri Lanka were allowed to recover from 59/6 & 94/7. For some bizarre reason, Yuvraj was persisted with despite having done his job in providing the breakthrough (Kulasekara). He's a part-time bowler, yet Dhoni got him to bowl 8 overs on the trot. Naturally, Yuvraj became less effective as his spell dragged on, conceding 16 runs in his last 2 overs. Dhoni should have brought back Munaf or Zaheer or Praveen (in that order of priority) to try and get the remaining 3 wickets (or at least get Jayawardene out).

Sangakkara needs to do something about Zaheer Khan's stranglehold on him. In 6 matches this year, he has been dismissed 5 times by Zaheer and has barely got a run. In the tests, he was driving away from the body and getting caught in the slips. In the one-dayers, he's been troubled by Zaheer getting the ball to cut in. I think this is because Sangakkara is moving a lot outside offstump when the ball is being delivered, possibly to cope with the swing or just as an attacking measure. As a result, he's forced to play at outswingers and when the ball does nip back, he's caught on the move. In any case, I hope he doesn't sort it out for the next couple of games at least!

Charles Davis, an Aussie statistician, seems to have misread his calendar. After a lot of meticulous & painstaking research, he claims to have discovered that 4 runs had to be added to Bradman's test run aggregate, which would give the Don an average of 100. But he seems to have sent in his report around 8 months too early - 1 Apr 2009 would have been the appropriate date for the story!

PS: Forget Beefy, I want to know who the heck writes Pietersen's scripts! He got a 100 and England won his first test in charge. Last week, in his first ODI as the official captain, he scored 90, helped England get 270, got two crucial wickets and England won!

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